Fueled by coffee
Fueled by a couple of strong coffees, I’ve some how managed to sketch up 5 different website designs in my web design Moleskine this morning. Hopefully over the next few days or so I can start putting the designs together, code wise that is.
I’ve always been into playing around with website design and development but until recently the ‘light bulb moment’ hadn’t happened for me and I had been struggling with some reasonably basic things…then the light bulb moment happened and well I’ve been motivated and sketching since. I still run into the odd problem, but the web design community is generally really good at helping each other out, so most of the time I can get an answer / solution to the problem within minutes.
So what are these designs actually for? Good question. At this stage one of them is for a mates band, Head of State, who are looking to relaunch their website for a run of upcoming shows and festivals. The others aren’t ’spoken for’ at this stage, so I might submit them to Theme Forest or one of those websites, not sure yet.
As the designs start to take shape I might post a few teaser screen grabs here, for now though I better get back to work.
NETTUTS - Check em out
I’ve been a PSDTUTS fan for a while now and read everything that Collis and his team put out into the ether, well recently Collis started a new tutorial website called NETTUTS.
Anyway, rather than re-tell the story I’d rather bring a couple of his / their articles to your attention that I thought are pretty handy things to know, learn, or be reminded of.
Here you go;
- How to Build a Maintainable Site using CushyCMS and Twitter - Recently I came to the realisation that I should really have a personal site. I don’t take design work, but it’s nice to have a place to refer to when I write bio’s and so on.
- Use Amazon S3 & Firefox To Serve Static Files - Hosting services have gotten a lot better in recent times, more storage, more bandwidth, cheaper prices. But there is only so far that regular hosting will go.
- 7 Crucial Tips for Designing and Maintaining a Large Site - Projects vary in scope and size, and the challenges they entail vary likewise. As a lone web designer, the biggest job I am responsible for is FlashDen. Along with thousands of active members all chatting, uploading and buying, the site processes large amounts of money and large amounts of traffic.
- Build a Sleek Portfolio Site from Scratch - There’s nothing like building an entire site to show you a good overview of how a CSS layout should work. Over at PSDTUTS we’ve got a tutorial where you design up a sleek, high end web design. In this tutorial we’re going to take that PSD file and build it with some nice clean HTML and CSS.
- Creating a PayPal Payment Form - Although it can have some issues, PayPal does provide a very simple way to take payments on a website. And with a little tweaking you can easily turn a PayPal “Buy Now” button into a form where the user specifies how much they’d like to pay and what they are paying for.
NETTUTS is regularly updated, they’re after more contributors as well, and their RSS is here.
Targeted Pain Relief
Yesterday I jumped right into the design for the new product website for the Pain Gone pen, Targeted Pain Relief. The list of things to get done was quite large, and there’s still a few bits and pieces that need to be completed, but I think I managed to make a big dent in the project.
Here’s what I got through;
- installed and configured wordpress
- installed and setup new theme purchased from Brian Gardner
- chose the colour palette (this was a big debate)
- customised the CSS to fit the new colour palette
- customised the navbar, background, footer, arrow, search, etc. images to fit the new CSS
- setup Google Webmaster account for TPR, submitted sitemap
- setup Google Analytics account for TPR, installed tracking urchin
- bought advertising on Google Adwords
- started loading up the content
And here’s what’s left to do;
- finish loading content, testimonials and product information
- install shopping cart and link to merchant bank account
- sit back and relax
Actually there is probably more than that to do but you get the idea that most of the work was completed yesterday. Big thanks to my mate up in Queensland, Greg, who helped me out with a bunch of problems at 10pm last night!
This morning I ran into a small problem with the Targeted Pain Relief website, it took ages to load! After a bit of checking around it turns out that Servage, my domain hosts, seem to be having load issues. Seeing as this is a business website, and needs to be up all the time and speedy. I’m going to start looking around at other hosting services. So far I’ve had a few suggestions, from the guys at Twitter, but none of them have been really what I’m looking for so I spoke to a mate who knows all about business hosting and he’s suggested Media Temple so I’m going to give them a go. At this stage I wont be moving it all till the weekend as I’m pretty stuck with other projects but I’ll let you know how I get on.
Anyway, I’ve gotta try and catch up with the work needed on the I’m With The Band website that I was supposed to complete yesterday….eeeep
Head on over to the Targeted Pain Relief website and have a look, let me know what you think… Oh and dont be too critical of the content, remember I’ve still got that to complete.
Cheers, Matt
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